


Search and Rescue

by Sholio



Category: Alliance-Union - C. J. Cherryh
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Families of Choice, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, Sabotage, claustrophobia warning - description of characters trapped in small spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 01:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14298096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: God, Ben, Meg thought as she went to get suited up, you better turn up alive, you skuz, or I'll beat you senseless and then let Dek take a turn.Which didn't make sense even to her, but it was that kind of a day.A violent act of sabotage leaves the Hellburner crew scattered and separated on a damaged station.





	Search and Rescue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opalmatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/gifts).



They should have been together. All four of them, whether they liked each other half the time or not: they were crew, they shouldn't have been split between assignments —

But orders came down as they would. And so Sal was in Maintenance for a shift because they were short-handed down there, and Ben was on comps in a different part of the station, and Dek and Meg were enjoying a rare opportunity to just have a nice plastic-tray meal together in front of the great curving windows in the lounge on the full-gee deck they rated for, these days, when they were in dock. It was about the closest thing they'd had to a date in the entire time they'd known each other, which — Meg thought — was a damn funny thing to realize as they were cutting up vat-grown pseudo-meat with the vast sweeping opposite curve of the station out there, stationary relative to them as the entire wheel rotated against the stars. Ben was over there in the opposite ring of the big wheel, which made her laugh, feeling like she should be waving to him. She really wasn't used to windows anymore.

And she could say that to Dek, knowing he'd understand; he was Sol Station, so he got some things about her that Sal and Ben just _didn't_ , spacer to the core that they were. Sol Station, inner system, where they had things like dinner dates, where they said good morning to each other. (Not that Dek was much for that kind of thing anyway, but she had the whole crew saying good morning to each other now, even Ben, which wasn't a Belter thing at all, and she was kind of proud of that.)

So they were just enjoying the novelty of a few hours off-shift with nothing to do and without the others around. Dek was cheerful, his knee pressed to hers under the table, grinning at her as they talked about some idiotic vid serial they'd all been watching off-shift when the new entertainment downloads came from Earth-way. Dek and Sal were addicted to it, but Meg usually fell asleep in the middle of episodes. She still didn't care about it, but she didn't mind the topic; she was watching his face mostly, thinking about how she'd said to Sal once, before she even really knew Dek at all, _Good bones on that boy_ ... and she was thinking about a few hours in their quarters without the others around, and things she'd like to get up to with those good bones ...

With the window right there, they had a front-row seat when the bomb went off on the far side of the ring.

 

***

 

Sal was on her knees and stretched to an uncomfortable angle, welding support struts to a new bank of hydroponics tanks, when the lights went out.

At least they hadn't actually put her _in_ the tanks, scrubbing things out, which meant nobody upstairs was pissed at her; it was just like they said, they needed some warm bodies to help out with maintenance, and she was certified for most of the basics.

And then everything shuddered underfoot, a jerk like when you changed direction with a hard burn — except this was the station, it wasn't supposed to move like that ... and the dark came down like a curtain over her eyes.

She had one instant when she thought it was something wrong with the face shield, pushed it up, but it was still pitch black. Voices started up in the darkness, and then emergency lights came on, casting a dull glow over everything.

Sal fumbled through the bad light and stowed her gear because that's what you did. It was bred into her, Shepherd's daughter that she was; you didn't leave so much as a bolt lying around, not to speak of something as large and as dangerous as a welding tank. Even on a station with its spin-induced gravity. And _especially_ when the gravity didn't feel quite right, not as heavy as it should have been at this level, or maybe like there was a wobble in it, like the station wasn't spinning as it should. And that was trez, trez bad.

But the corridors were worse, people shoving each other, red light strobing over everything just for that extra touch of disorientation, and nobody she asked knew what was going on, though rumors ran fast and thick. Voice over the loudspeakers said stay in your section. She could still feel that _wobble,_ coming up through the soles of her feet, and she didn't know where her crewmates were.

So she pushed through the crowd, thinking of Morrie Bird getting shot, of Meg getting shot, of all the ways there were for people to disappear out here in the great endless dark ...

Elbowed people out of way, ignored the cursing and the way they elbowed back.

"Don't know where my crew is — ugh, get _off_ , I need to get to the elevators."

"Locked down," someone said. "Power's down, no lifts."

Ice in her guts. It was too much like that other time. "Stairs then, I don't care, I don't know where my partners are — get your ass out of my _way_ or I'll move it for you —"

 

***

 

"— _out_ of here, I don't know where my crew is, damn it!"

"Dek. Cher. Calm." Meg gripped him by the arm, hard enough she knew it must have hurt. "Won't get us out of here that way. Calma, calma."

Could be worse, she told herself. Could be worse. They had spin and therefore gravity — a little off kilter because the ring was out of balance, but it felt like that was starting to even out — and they still had power here, which she gathered was not true on other parts of the station. The debris shields over the windows had slammed shut, doors had sealed too as the decompression alarm wailed, and now they were trapped in the lounge. Still, a station wouldn't go down from one hit like a ship might. It was too big, and besides, stations were built to be modular. Everything would be sealed off, and meanwhile, station management would be scrambling anything that could fly, float, or move under its own power in any way, trying to get out there and scoop up survivors.

She hoped.

And there were two goddamn pilots _right here_ , with the clock ticking. Meg knew all too well what a mess it would be out there, and how every minute counted; there would be survivors trapped in sections that were venting atmo, or staying alive with emergency oxy masks while their skin froze off —

Dek's arm was shaking under her hand. She wished someone would cut that damn alarm.

"Hey," she said, accosting the nearest Fleet uniform she saw. "Scuse, I'm a pilot, we both are, we're assigned to the —"

"Don't care," the uniform told her. She wished Graff was here, because siccing Graff on him would be very satisfying indeed. "Best thing you can do right now is stay put, all right?"

Meg cursed and kicked one of the chairs, spinning the seat on its stationary base bolted to the floor. For good measure, she slapped a drink off the table. The plastic glass hit the floor and rolled, without even providing the satisfying shatter of real glass.

It got a slight smile out of Dekker, at least. He sat on the edge of the table, resting a hip on it. Still looked white and sharp around the edges, but he could talk, at least. "Getting mad and breaking things is supposed to be my job. You taking my job, Kady?"

"God." She scrubbed her hands through her hair. Didn't know where Sal was, though probably not in the damaged section; hadn't she said she was going to be in Hydroponics? Assuming there was only _one_ damaged section ...

And Ben. Smack in the middle of that part of the station's great wheel that she'd watched come apart ...

It had looked a lot the way a ship did when it ruptured in space, cracking open and spilling its guts into the void: flashes of fire that instantly dissipated as hard vacuum snuffed them, clouds of freezing vapor, bits of debris that looked like dust from here but she knew were equipment and people ...

She'd seen Dekker's reaction to her own expression, as he tried to understand the horror on her face, then turned and looked for himself ...

The debris shields had slammed down a moment after that, cutting off the view.

"Union, you think?" she said, to stop herself thinking too much about what was going on out there. "Merchanter? Rab? Some lone wacko with a grudge?"

"What's it to us who it is?" Dek said.

He was right, though they didn't even have to talk about whether it was intentional. You didn't get that kind of destruction from an innocent accident. It was only in the vids that flipping two wires the wrong way made everything go up in a fireball, burning impossibly huge and hot in the void.

That kind of thing made Ben just about rupture something when they were watching vids. Implausible plots he didn't much care about; stories about fictional people doing made-up things weren't that interesting to him anyway. Implausible science, though, drove him up the wall. Sometimes when they had some down time and it was Sal's turn or hers to pick out the night's entertainment, they liked to put on a space epic just to watch Ben's face turn various shades of red at the terrible science.

Sal.

Ben ...

Sal was a question mark. She could deal with that, if she worked hard on it. Didn't know what was going on elsewhere on the station. Didn't think Sal's section had gone down, though one couldn't be sure. But she'd _seen_ the opposite side of the ring come apart. Couldn't stop seeing it.

"You think he was in one of the sealed sections?" she asked. She'd wrapped her arms around herself without realizing she was doing it. Was it cold in this room? Were they losing heat? Air? No, everything was sealed tight, she'd have noticed the condensation or the breeze ...

Someone finally cut the alarm, leaving the lounge in a hush in which their voices seemed too loud.

"Damn right he was," Dekker said. He pushed off from the table, the way people did by habit when they'd spent enough time in null-gee to expect to get a momentum boost, even though it was a full gee here. "You know Ben. He's better at taking care of himself than any of the rest of us."

She huffed a small laugh. "Not saying much, that."

 

***

 

Well, this was effing inconvenient and really not how he'd planned on spending this day _at all._

Compulsively, unable to stop, Ben pressed the fingers of his good hand against the narrow confines of his — _coffin,_ some part of his brain wanted to say, checking for leaks. Cold nipped at his fingertips. His other hand was curled against his chest; pretty sure he'd broken the wrist getting knocked around in this damn metal tomb. It was pitch dark in here, but when he felt around, he could feel the slickness of condensation on metal. Because of rapid cooling outside? Or because he was leaking atmo?

_Guess you'll find out when you suffocate ..._

It was hard vacuum outside, though. That much he could guess. Nothing else would be chilling things down this fast.

He was in a supply locker. It had been the only thing he could think of when the floor bucked like a snapped line and the walls came apart. He'd had seconds, no more, and he'd heard that the lockers were airtight so they could be used to transport materials in non-pressurized cargo containers without exposing the contents to vacuum. As he saw that wave of disaster coming his way, decompression alarms shrieking, he'd lunged for the nearest one, grabbed hold of the digital media storage rack that mostly filled it, and flung it out of the way to make room for him. He slammed the door and held it shut, not trusting the automatic seal, as the whole thing tumbled with him in it, bashing him around the inside of the thing as the gravity orientation changed. These lockers were designed to be easy to open from the inside, because if somebody got accidentally locked in, they _would_ suffocate. 

Trying not to think about that right now.

And especially trying not to think about the big button that, if he accidentally hit it with his elbow, would open the door, release all his air, and expose him to vacuum. Let's just call that the death button, he thought, and leave it the hell alone, how's that sound?

Tightness around his chest, like a cold hand squeezing his lungs, couldn't be lack of oxygen. Not yet. Numbers said not. So there was no reason to panic and it wasn't like panicking would do anything but make his situation a whole lot worse, so how about not doing that, Benjy old boy?

Not suffocation time yet, still got a couple hours to go, at least.

Though it wasn't like he could read his watch in the dark anyway. Might have thought of that problem sooner. Didn't matter so much yet, he knew it hadn't been _that_ long, but as the minutes stretched out he couldn't keep track. How long already? Five minutes? Ten? Half an hour? His survival was going to pivot on it, and he had no way of knowing how long it had been ...

_Fuck, is THAT why he was always asking about the goddamn time?_

... Focus on the facts of the situation. Cold facts. Put the puzzle pieces together.

He didn't think he was free floating. There was still gravity, making it feel as if the locker was (subjectively) tilted at about 30 degrees. So the station was still spinning, and he was still on it, or in it. But things weren't good, because that was the utter chill of space on the other side of these thin metal walls. He might be buried in debris, no way to tell. And he was enclosed in a space he could barely stand up in, positioned so that he couldn't comfortably stand up _or_ sit down, with no radio. 

He kept running the numbers for oxygen levels and CO2 buildup in his head. They weren't comforting.

And he didn't want to think about the others who'd been in the room. Other programmers, most of whom he'd just met today, some he'd known from other jobs. It had been all he could do to save himself. Stop to help a buddy, get yourself dead — that's how it worked in a situation like that. 

The voice in his head that sounded a little like Bird said, _But you could have tried..._

Christ, what about the rest of the station? He couldn't be the only survivor, odds were well and truly against it, but no telling how much of it had been affected by the explosion or whatever the hell it was, no way to know whether it'd gotten the part of the station where Sal was, or Dek and Meg ...

Nothing to do in here but think, and most of what he had to think about was the odds of rescue (not good, but he couldn't calculate it right, he didn't have most of the data he needed), how much air he had left, or what had happened to the rest of the station. Too much time to think about Sal and Meg and Dekker, and worse, Bird and Ben's parents and other people who hadn't beaten the odds just one critical time, but one time was all it took ...

No wonder Dekker had been a lunatic when they'd picked him up.

Which was also something he didn't want to think about.

Wasn't really much he _did_ want to think about, if it came to that.

Except how much he wanted them to find him. Or anyone to find him, anyone at all, but his thoughts kept circling around to the rest of his crew, and the thing was — he didn't like knowing it, hell, it scared him like staring down Jupiter's gravity well, but ...

But he knew that if they were still alive, they'd be looking. He trusted in that like he trusted in the laws of physics, like he trusted in the immutable numbers that gave him how many hours and minutes he had left to live.

 

***

 

After much too long cooling their heels in the lounge, after calm arguments escalated to threats and back down again, after trying a dozen times to circumvent the security lockdown and call someone in their direct chain of command — Meg had finally managed to sweet-talk their way out of lockdown and onto one of the search-and-rescue crews.

She got it, she did; there were more people wanting to help than there were coordinators or ships, and the last thing they needed was a bunch of civilians floundering around out there, getting in each other's way and making it harder for the crews to do their jobs

Still didn't know where Sal was. Still no word from Ben. 

But they gave Meg a beat-up old tug because she'd done this before, flown station tugs during her long and rather checkered career in the Belt. It was going to be scut work, not searching for survivors along the shattered span of the ring, where she'd rather be, but moving debris out of the way so the bigger ships could get in and pull out victims. Dek could've done the same, he'd been flying tugs when he was just a teenager back on Sol Station, but she thought he'd be better down below, doing something with his hands. Knew how Dek could get. Give him things he could pick up and carry. Keep him busy. Don't give him all that time to think out in the tug; that was the kind of thing that messed him up. He didn't fight over it, which made her think he knew it too.

So Dek was on one of the crews going out in suits to hand-clear debris from the ring itself, what was left of it, and help get oxygen to survivors 'til the ships could pull them out. _That_ clock was running down fast now, with a lot of the survivors trapped in airlocks or anything else that'd hold an airtight seal, with no heat or power, no way to replenish oxygen —

"Kady!"

Meg spun around, the grin already breaking out all over her face. "Aboujib!"

Sal was half suited up, the suit's sleeves trailing loose and the helmet in her hand. They came together in the middle of the 4-deck concourse near the 'locks, just another three-body system in the melee of frantic activity going on around them. Dek kissed Sal on the cheek; she got an arm around him, one around Meg, and they hugged, awkward and desperate. Nobody wanted to let go at the end of it; Dekker had his hand on Sal's elbow, and her arm was tucked tight around Meg's waist.

Sal's anxious eyes searched both their faces. "Ben —"

"Nothing," Meg said, "but nothing from you, either. Could be he's stuck on a different part of the station. Everything's locked down."

Sal made a face. "I know. You wanna know where I've been this past hour and change? Brig, that's where, for level-jumping on the stairs, used that override code shiz to unlock the doors that Ben showed us awhile back. Station security _don't_ like that."

"Punch your way out?"

"Hell if! They needed volunteers skilled with EVA. Told 'em I was ex-Shepherd. I was nice as pie." She nudged Dekker. "Take lessons."

"I'm nice," Dekker said, mock-wounded. Both the women laughed.

"Kady, you launching or taking a nap?" a voice called, and Meg blew out a breath. They let go reluctantly, hands trailing off each other — her last sight was Dek with his head close to Sal's, talking to her, Sal leaning into him a little bit.

God, Ben, Meg thought as she went to get suited up, you better turn up alive, you skuz, or I'll beat you senseless and then let Dek take a turn.

Which didn't make sense even to her, but it was that kind of a day.

 

***

 

It was a tossup what was going to get him first, Ben thought muzzily, the CO2 or the cold or the sheer mind-numbing boredom. 

He'd thought he was good at dealing with boredom; hell, he used to spend months on the _Trinidad_ with Bird, nothing to do except read and sleep and exercise and run calculations, and he dealt with it fine. But he had now discovered that being on a ship, however small, with a partner was a hell of a different thing than being alone in the dark and the cold, with literally nothing to do except sit there and wait for someone to find him.

Also, he really wished he could stop thinking about Bird. Next it was going to be hallucinations and asking people the time.

He'd ended up hunched at the bottom of the locker, in the closest position he could achieve to sitting down considering the cramped confines and the tilted angle. Huddling and moving as little as possible helped him conserve both heat and oxygen, but it was hell on the joints. His legs had gone through pain to numbness; his back and shoulders hurt like hell. He wondered if he was courting gangrene or frostbite. But there was nowhere to move _to,_ and every time he stretched or shifted he was terrified of hitting that damn button and releasing what air he had left.

Not that there was much of it. He could tell that by his splitting headache and the clammy, sick feeling. It had to be CO2 buildup, not really lack of oxygen as such, but there was no difference from where he was sitting. If life support goes out, carbon dioxide and other toxins get you before the breathable oxygen runs out, every Belter child knows that. Could run down the list of CO2 toxicity symptoms in his head but it wasn't like that was going to make him feel better.

How much air left?

Doesn't help to think about it ...

CO2 toxicity or panic? Hard to tell the difference anymore ...

There _might_ have been a few mild panic attacks, back there in the dark infinity between now and that moment when he'd slammed the locker door. Not to be spoken of, ever. But what he didn't dare even think about was the possibility that he might _really_ lose it one of these times, that his desperation to be out of this effing _coffin_ would overwhelm him 'til he hit that big friendly DEATH button on purpose, threw open the door, and turned a slow unpleasant death into a fast unpleasant death.

Very unhelpful thought, that one.

He made a fist of the hand with the broken wrist. The pain brought tears to his eyes, but it gave him something else to concentrate on, other than Unhelpful Thoughts. It was a grounding technique he'd seen Dekker use, and, well ...

Bad sign, _real_ bad sign, when he was looking to Moonbeam for mental health tips.

Still, when you needed advice, you went to an expert, and Dekker was an expert in Crazy.

And it did help. Some.

Another thing he'd seen Dekker do was touch things. Just touch things, a chair or a table, reminding himself where he was. It did help, too: not that being _here_ , in Ben's case, was an improvement over being literally anywhere else short of the heart of a sun, but it got him out of his head a little bit, reminded him of the physical reality of the world. Couldn't really do it with his hands anymore; he had to use his elbow, bumping it against the inner wall of the locker. The metal was too cold to touch without fabric to protect his skin.

Which didn't make it any easier to hold himself in something like a comfortable position. Not that there were comfortable positions in here.

God, every part of him hurt, and it felt like there was a wet cloth over his face; he had to struggle to draw every breath. 

It had occurred to him that he'd be a lot more likely to be rescued if he could somehow signal his presence in the locker. He _wasn't_ the only survivor; he could feel occasional shuddering underneath him that made him think there were others moving around in the debris. He'd tried yelling until he realized it was no good in a vacuum, and then he tried banging on the inside of the locker, tearing strips off his hands as they flash-froze to the bitterly cold metal. Eventually he hit on the idea of using one of the media storage tapes scattered around him (making it even more uncomfortable trying to sit down) and started tapping out Morse code with the corner of one of those. He tried SOS, tried his name, tried longer messages just to give him something to do, except he was starting to forget in the middle what word he was trying to spell out ...

The tape slipped from his numb, bleeding hand and clattered to the bottom of the locker.

I'm scared, he thought.

"You guys want to find me, now's a good time." His voice sounded hoarse and thready. God, he was cold. 

He'd been trying hard not to talk to himself, because he'd found out all too well, with Dekker, what it looked like from the outside. Didn't want to be that. But it was hard not to. Sometimes he cleared his throat just to hear the sound. Saw things in the dark: faces, people. There _was_ an edge, and he was close to it; never realized how much ...

He didn't want to die out here, desperately did not want to die. 

But just as much, he didn't want to think about the possibility that what he'd be going back _to_ would be a different crew, a different life.

Maybe he'd get Stockholm this time ...

He still wanted it. Still felt the pull of Earth, like its gravity could affect a man all the way out in the Belt. But ... 

But he had wanted to see Sal's face when she saw plants for the first time growing free and wild like they did down at the bottom of the motherwell. Wanted Meg, as the closest thing to an insystem guide they had, to show them the places Bird used to talk about; wanted to find out if Dekker was twice as crazy with a planet to stand on, in a gravity that wasn't caused by station spin.

If they were dead, he didn't know what he wanted. Not anymore.

He picked up a tape, had to try three times before he got his fingers to cooperate in a decent grip. Lost track of what he was doing halfway through until the tape fell in his lap. Picking it up, teeth clenched, he started tapping again.

 

***

 

Seeing the station from the outside was brut hard, Meg thought. Peeled like an egg, it was — there must have been more than one explosion, several simultaneous ones by the looks of it. Whoever had done it knew their job; they'd set the charges so the wall peeled away, leaving the station's inner structure exposed like a cutaway cross section, defeating the automated decompression system that sealed the doors between sections, but couldn't do anything about the walls.

But there were still intact sections between. She glimpsed the lights of ships winking as they moved in and out, and half tuned out the radio chatter: six people found alive in a sealed conference room on 4-deck, two in the airlock on 7 —

Any of those could be Ben. So could any of the bodies floating out here — and there _were_ bodies, frozen stiff now, hard to distinguish from the general mess of furniture, office supplies, electronics, bathroom fixtures, pieces of the station itself ... Anything and everything needed for life was floating around out here. A potted plant drifted past her, surreally frozen like a sculpture of some tentacled sea life, and someone's half-eaten sandwich. Somehow those little touches of humanity, the detritus of lives wiped out in the vacuum of space, were harder to deal with than the actual bodies. She tried to ignored them, tagged the bodies and left those too, and focused on moving the bigger pieces around, the ones that would cause the worst problems for the rescue crews.

Trying to tell herself she was doing what she was needed to do. Fix her mind on the work; couldn't let her concentration slip when she was jockeying a piece of scrap metal five times longer that the tug. 

Tell herself she'd hear from Sal or Dek if they did find him.

Tell herself not every story out here had a hard ending, sometimes you did get a win. And try to pretend it was fumes making her eyes burn and sting in the cockpit, blurring the world to rainbows that she blinked angrily away — couldn't afford that, couldn't afford not to have her eyes clear and her hands rock steady as she guided each piece of twisted metal out of the way. 

She was so goddamn tired of losing friends.

 

***

 

Dekker hadn't realized how awkward it was going to be, wearing a spacesuit in gee. Three quarter gee, something like that, the deck he was on right now, but damn awkward for all that. Screwed with your perception too, knowing it was vacuum around him, _seeing_ it was vacuum around him, the stars right out there where the walls were supposed to be and debris floating against those ice-cold little pricks of light — but if he picked something up in here (to the extent there was still an "in" with the walls mostly gone), it fell straight down.

Still felt like he should be tied off to something. Didn't feel safe being here without a line and clip, even though he knew the clip was his boots on the ground, the line was gravity.

Made things easier in some ways, harder in others, especially since they were zipping past a shit ton of debris, all in motion on its own myriad trajectories, that kept getting caught in the spin and falling into the station's gravity. Tugs like Meg's were cleaning it up as fast as they could — he saw some out there with nets and electromagnets, scooping up the little stuff, while the bigger pieces were cleared out individually. But it was everywhere, big things and tiny ones, fragments and dust and vapor.

A _lot_ of work, for weeks to come. Flying in or out of the station was going to be unusually hazardous for a long time.

Not to speak of the loss of life.

Sons of bitches. Like he'd said to Meg, he didn't care who'd done it — didn't care how much they hated Fleet, the UDC, Earth, whatever the hell had the bug up their ass. God knows he had good enough reason to hate all of those too. But that was in the abstract; when it came down to actual _people,_ to taking a bomb and ripping open a station and spilling human beings out into the black ...

People like Ben. Like Sal. Hell, it could've happened just as easily on the other side of the station, tearing open the lounge and sending him and Meg tumbling into that cold abyss. A death in hard vacuum gave you time to _think_ ; that was the worst part. It was like falling from a great height; there was just enough to time to realize how screwed you really were ...

He worked in grim silence, surrounded by frozen death. Handling it better than he'd worried he might. It wasn't triggering anything or messing with his head, at least no more so than he had to deal with in everyday life, and not even as bad as flying Hellburner 1.

Sal, on the other hand ... she was working busy and steady at a pace designed to tire anyone, especially someone not used to hard labor in gee. Dekker at least had more experience with gee, knew how to pace himself. Every time he turned around Sal was there, lifting or carrying something. Each frozen body they found spurred her onward to further frantic activity. When she slipped on the other end of a file cabinet they were moving away from the door of one of the intact sections, dropping it and nearly crushing her foot, Dekker told her through the suit comm, "Go in. Take a break. Get some calories in you."

"I'm good."

"No you aren't. You're going to make mistakes. Maybe hole your suit. Go in for an hour, come back out."

She blew out a breath that fogged the faceplate, blinked fiercely, and said, "You too."

"Trade off when you come back."

Hesitation. Nod. "Half an hour," she said, clasping his arm through the suit, and was off, moving in the way Dekker had to fight himself not to do: that bounding motion you always _wanted_ to do in a suit, because your reflexes said "suit" and "null gee", but in gravity it just hurt your hips and tired you out faster.

And of course it was not ten minutes after that when a voice came on the comms: "Where's Dekker? Sal Aboujib? Paul Dekker?"

"Here," he said, straightening up and stretching out his back. "Aboujib just went inside for a break."

"You the one looking for a Ben Pollard?"

A hot rush through him of ... something. Hope or fear or something that had no name. "Yeah, that's me."

"He's been found. Still working on the extraction. Over toward the 3-deck lifts."

Extraction, they'd said. Extraction implied a body. He didn't call Sal yet. The heat of excitement froze to ice in his veins, and he had to draw a breath into lungs gone tight before he could ask the question: "Alive?"

"Looks like," was the answer, and he was already headed that way, taking running leaps despite the three-quarters gee. 

"Someone get Aboujib. She's on the station. What's he holed up in?" Everyone who'd made it through the decompression had managed to get themselves locked up somewhere — a sealed room, an airlock, even suits for the lucky ones who'd been already suited up or close enough to a changing locker.

"Storage bin. He's got to be just about out of air in there. We haven't been able to talk to him properly yet."

"How do you know it's him in there?" He considered trying to climb up, get out of the spin and its corresponding gee, and take a shortcut across to the section where they'd found Ben — nowhere near where by all accounts Ben was _supposed_ to be; momentum was a hell of a thing. Which was what made Dekker decide not to try a shortcut despite the tantalizing gravity-free zone around the station. He didn't need to paste himself across a floating file cabinet.

"He was knocking in Morse code on the inside," the voice on the radio told him. "Picked up the vibrations from the tapping and got his name and status the same way. Can't move it; it's buried in a few tons of crumpled bulkhead."

Damned gee, making _everything_ more complicated. This would be easier if they could spin the station down ... "How are you planning on getting him out?"

But he found out when he got there. An S&R team had set up some lights all around and was already in the process of putting up a temporary — very temporary — pressurized zone in the middle of the rubble using plastic sheeting. "Just enough oxygen and pressure that he can survive without a suit for a few minutes, long enough for us to get him into one," the coordinator told Dekker.

"I'm going to be in there." He didn't make it a question.

"So get in and let us seal it."

It was like being inside a hot-air balloon, or a tent — at least what he figured it would be like, not having had any actual experience with either one. The plastic billowed around them as it inflated. There wasn't much room in here; it was just Dekker and the medic from the S&R team along with an empty suit. And the locker in which, apparently, Ben had spent the elapsed time since the explosion. It still looked intact, barely even dented, which was a damn miracle or a testament to the engineering of the company that'd built it — given how it was tangled up in a mess of crumpled bulkheads, sticking out of the rubble near the ceiling with the bottom at about waist height on Dekker. 

They'd cleared the door, so Dekker rapped on it with his gloved knuckles. There was a pause that seemed to take an eternity before a quick tap came back from inside.

His heart lurched. Still couldn't tell for sure if it was Ben in there, but it was someone alive at least. Dekker looked at the medic, who he'd been introduced to, but the name had slid straight out of his head. "How much longer?"

"I just got the all-clear. Oxygen and N2 are high enough in here that he can breathe. Better make it fast, though."

Dekker fumbled with his helmet seals with his gloved hands. "Hey —" the medic said.

"He can breathe in here, I can too, right?" It still felt ten kinds of wrong to pop the helmet off, _knowing_ they were in vacuum. The billowing white walls of their enclosure felt a long step less secure than a bulkhead. But there was air in here, though it was thin and bitterly cold and smelled metallic.

"Trust but verify?" the medic said wryly.

"That, and it's easier if the first thing you see isn't your own reflection in a faceplate." Things hadn't quite gone that way with Ben and Bird. He had no memory of being pulled out of the ship. But ... he knew what you'd want to see. If he was in that position. A helmet wasn't it.

He flipped the door switch and swung it open.

Ben tumbled onto him like a kid's toy springing out of a box. And it _was_ Ben, white and shivering in station clothes, office clothes, a sweater and once-nice jacket — layers probably helped keep him warm, not as good as a stimsuit, but good enough. Face the color of old sealant, bruised, looking ten kinds of hell. Fingers leaving bloody streaks on Dekker's borrowed EVA suit. 

Alive.

 

***

 

There had been times when Ben Pollard had been genuinely glad to see Dekker, not that he'd admit to it, but never quite to this extent. Dek was solid and _there,_ and Ben hung onto him for all he was worth with the one hand that still worked, even if the fingers looked like hamburger and he could barely feel what he was holding onto. His head was splitting and the light was way too bright after all that dark; it made his eyes water. But. He was _out._

Dekker gave a sort of a startled laugh, a sound Ben almost never heard from him, not like _that_ , bright and happy. Wasn't used to seeing him grin like that, either. Like Dekker couldn't pick a better time to paste an idiot grin on his stupid face for possibly the first time in his life. Ben had other concerns.

"How ... long," he said semi-incoherently through chattering teeth.

Dekker didn't have to ask _How long since what._ Ben did like that about him. "Two or three hours, I guess. Give or take. Maybe more like four or five? Couldn't tell you the exact number."

"Course you can't," Ben said, trying to get his legs under him and failing in the damn gravity. Wasn't for Dekker, he'd have been on his face. Two hours? Five he'd believe. Twelve sounded more like it, or twenty, even though the numbers didn't add up; no way he'd had that much air in there, or anything close to it.

"Turnaround, isn't it," Dekker said, holding him up with an arm around his ribs and the steadying pressure of a hand on his shoulder, "you asking me the time?"

... and to think he'd almost forgotten what Dekker's sense of humor was like.

Dek and the other one, Swanson or Sorenson or something, helped him into a suit. He wasn't much use at being anything but deadweight; all he could do was gulp air and try not to shiver himself apart. It was Dekker's grip on him, mostly, that was keeping him upright. Trying to get his arms into the suit made him hiss in pain. Every joint and muscle felt like it was on fire. Legs were just about useless, feet like blocks of wood with feeling coming back in a million agonizing hornet stings. Torn-up fingers leaving blood all over everything. God.

They left the arm with the broken wrist alone, had it doubled up and pressed against his chest as they sealed the suit around it.

"Turning up the suit oxygen a little here," the medic said. "Air was bad in there. He could use the extra to get his O2 sats up."

"Sal," Ben said to Dekker as they fussed around him, trying to get the words out without accidentally biting his tongue. Lips wouldn't cooperate. "Meg."

"Both fine."

And that was the feeling again, wasn't it — same as knowing they'd come if they could, and they _had_ and now Dekker was sealing the helmet of his suit for him and he couldn't stop feeling that clutch in his guts, not entirely a _good_ feeling ... it wasn't smart to wrap yourself up in people like this, it didn't make _sense,_ not like numbers made sense —

But it wasn't that different from knowing your partner wouldn't screw you over on a run, and _that_ made sense, that was just good business.

And they'd found him, they really had.

"I've got it, get off," Ben said over the suit comm, trying to bat Dekker's hands away with the one (sort of) working arm he had, even though Dekker was still more than half holding him up.

Dekker checked the suit seals anyway, then nodded to the medic they were clear to exit the portable habitat. "Can you walk?"

"You want to carry me?"

Dekker laughed again.

 

***

 

Sal was waiting when they came in the airlock, Dekker and some other guy half-guiding, half-carrying Ben.

Didn't matter; she ran in and threw her arms around Ben as soon as they were clear of the cycling airlock. He staggered and Dekker let go as soon as she had him so Dek could start taking off his own suit.

Ben hugged her back one-armed, hard enough to knock the breath out of her, then started fumbling one-handed with his helmet, uncharacteristically clumsy. Sal took it off for him so she could press her cheek against his and say into his ear, "You look rough, brut rough. Don't do that to us again, cher."

"Didn't do it in the first place."

Typical Ben. Though he sounded as bad as he looked.

"You hurt bad?" she asked. He had one arm tucked inside his suit, she found as she started to help him off with the sleeves, which hinted at further injuries besides the ones she could see. "There's an aid station set up the other end of this concourse, and they're taking the worst cases through to Medical, lockdown be damned."

Ben shook his head and winced like it hurt his neck. "I'm not too bad." His teeth were chattering; she could barely understand him. "Just need a painkiller ... and someone could point me at a bathroom, that'd be trez fuckin' all right."

"No more rabspeak, Benjy cher, it sounds all wrong coming out of that pretty mouth. Let's get you out of this first ..." She helped him sit down so she could take the boots off.

"Kady?" he asked, glancing around. "Dekker said — but —"

"Out in a tug. She'll be headed in soon as she can get away."

"She's okay."

"She's okay." She got it: you needed to see with your own eyes, feel with your own hands. You did what had to be done, of course, but she didn't like having Meg out there and them down here, not after all of this.

 

***

 

Meg found them in the med station on the 4-deck concourse. It was overflowing with the minor injuries that didn't necessitate a trip to Medical: sprains and burns and mild cases of vacuum exposure.

More of the power was back up, she noticed. There were lights and it wasn't as chilly down here as it had been when she'd said goodbye to Dek and Sal not so long ago.

Ben was getting his wrist wrapped up in an inflatable splint and sucking on a rehydration packet in between occasional pulls of oxygen on a portable mask, held gingerly in bandaged fingers. He was wrapped in blankets with Sal and Dek on either side of him, just a little too close to be casual. Meg kissed him straight on the dry, cracked lips, then gave Dek a good hard kiss to make sure there weren't any hard feelings.

"You gonna tell me I look like shit too?" Ben asked in a not so friendly way. His voice was hoarse, but he sounded like himself. Mostly. "I had to take it from these two already."

"Do you want me to?" She ran her fingers through her helmet-flattened hair to fluff it up. Ben rolled his eyes. Sal picked up the oxygen mask and put it over Ben's face before he could say anything.

Dekker slid his arm around Meg's waist and she leaned against him. "You got to go back out?" he asked her.

Meg shook her head. "Not yet. They've got more than enough pilots for the number of ships, so they're having us take short shifts, help avoid burnout and stupid mistakes. I'm off duty for at least long enough to eat something and rest a little. Go back to quarters for a bit."

"Yeah," Sal said, "good luck getting there."

"Fuck." She'd forgotten the lockdown. "You going to Medical, Pollard?"

Ben shook his head — carefully; he was moving slow and deliberate, like a spacer in from months in null-gee. "Just need to get warmed up and rehydrated, mostly." He took another sip from the rehydration packet's tube and grimaced. "Would _love_ a good hot shower in our actual quarters, but it sounds like that's out for the moment."

Meg glanced down the concourse, where the displaced were staking out patches of floor and someone in a Fleet uniform was handing out soup packets. "Looks like we're bunking here."

Dekker and Meg went to get some blankets and food before they ran out, discreetly leaving the other two alone for a few minutes, or as alone as you could get with what felt like half the station population around.

... and she did _not_ have an instant of panic when they got back to the aid station and found them gone. It was only for a minute; they located Sal shortly, waving at them from down the concourse. 

Sal had found them a pretty decent spot, a little alcove that was semi-private, if a bit chillier than out where the air circulation was better. Ben was sitting there already, head resting in his one bandaged hand and the arm with the splint lying limply across his lap. It looked like whatever energy had been keeping him mobile and snarky earlier was running down fast.

Meg could relate, to that part at least. She was tired to death, physically and emotionally. Couldn't have gone back out right now if she had wanted to, not without some pretty hardcore meds to get her alert and functional. It was about all she could do to help Dek and Sal, who both looked like they were dragging worse than she was, spread out the blankets to make a sort of nest.

It wasn't the closest quarters they'd ever been in. The women tucked in around Ben, who was still shivering. Dekker passed around soup packets before pulling a blanket around himself and draping an arm over Meg to rest his hand on Ben's shoulder. Meg helped Ben open his soup packet and pull the heat-tab. He mumbled something that appeared to be somewhere between thanks and a complaint as she folded his bandaged fingers around it.

Dek was warm against her back. She had her leg over Ben's, and felt Sal's strong fingers close around her ankle, completing the circuit.

Alive. They were alive. Even Ben had almost stopped shivering and was making an earnest try at the soup packet.

Sal was pressed to Ben's side like she wanted to glue herself to him. She seemed to be asleep already, or at least was doing a good impression of it. Ben was nodding off, too, and Meg caught the half-empty soup packet as it slipped from his fingers, set it carefully on the floor, moving as little as she could so as not to disturb anyone.

Ben woke an instant later, starting awake with an all-over jerk and a choked-off gasp.

"No spooking on us," Dekker murmured. Meg hadn't even realized he was still awake, but she felt his arm move across her shoulders, grip tightening on the back of Ben's neck. " _I'm_ the spook on this team, remember?"

"Got that right," Ben muttered, but Meg could feel him relaxing against her, twitching as he slipped back into sleep, with his head on her shoulder and Sal's on his.

Dekker's breathing was warm and regular against her neck, Sal's lax fingers draped over her ankle. She could hardly move for the pressure of their bodies against her, and she didn't mind in the slightest.

After feeling cold for hours, she was finally warm.

**Author's Note:**

> ... so I will admit I played somewhat fast and loose with Ben's survival chances in this, but it's not actually _that_ far-fetched. The internet tells me that a person trapped in a sealed coffin will probably suffocate in about an hour due to CO2, although technically there's enough oxygen for 5 or 6 hours. (I love that there are actual webpages on this.) And there is an actual, documented case of a guy in a coma surviving in a buried coffin for TWO DAYS. So if the interior of his locker is slightly bigger than a coffin, and he's not moving much and trying to conserve air as much as possible, I figured that it was possible to get as much as a few hours with at least SOME degree of plausibility.
> 
> Cold was the other area where I suspected I was cheating, but then again, maybe not, because despite space being very cold, it is apparently a very effective insulator because there is no thermal conductivity in vacuum; objects have to cool down by directly radiating energy into the void. Objects in space DO get cold, of course, and conductive ones like metal would do it faster, but they don't do it nearly as fast as they do in the movies. Unlike the coffin thing, I couldn't find actual numbers without having to do the math myself ... which, no ... but I started out thinking that a 300-degree temperature difference would cool down almost instantly -- and sure, in atmosphere, it would, but in space, maybe not so much. In fact, on satellites and such, the biggest problem they have is not things getting too cold; it's overheating. An unheated, unpowered object in space definitely WOULD get much too cold to sustain life sooner or later, but I think you might be talking more like several hours or even days than a matter of minutes (as I worried at first).
> 
> I thought about including some of the handwaves in the fic but decided not to, thinking that over-explaining it might end up making it even _less_ plausible than if I leave a lot of it vague. Still, I went into researching this thinking that there was probably no way he could possibly survive the way I had him surviving (but determined to roll with it somehow anyway, because h/c) and came out of it thinking, you know, this might actually work. At the very least I don't think it's impossible! One in a million shot, maybe, but that's fiction for you. (And this crew in particular ... I mean, if anyone WAS going to survive something that probably should have killed him ...)


End file.
